There is a group put out of the synagogue and they are dealt with. They vote with their feet – a small group. They are kept from the hour of trial. There is no guarantee that any of these people are not going to have to pay with their lives for the Faith of God. Nobody is going to give us a guarantee that we will not face persecution. Nobody but God and Jesus Christ knows what we are, whats inside us and what we can sustain or bear. We are tried by fire. What we have to do is prepare ourselves to deal with the whole concept. There are a number of promises to different churches. For example, if we look at Revelation 2:24 theres a promise to the Thyatirans. They have great works in the beginning and end, and the last works are greater than the first. They bore the brunt of 1,260 years of persecution. A large number of martyrs were taken out over that period. The rest of you in Thyatira who do not hold to this doctrine (of sacrificing food to idols) who have not learned the deep things of Satan...only hold fast till I come... The Thyatiran era will be alive in the Last Days, and are our brethren over in Europe. Christ is not laying any great burden on them again. Theyve already been through the Stalinist persecutions. They have been through the 1,260 years and have been persecuted for a long time. Tribulation has been put on them for hundreds of years. If we are not prepared to sacrifice for Jesus Christ then we have no part in him. There was only one Apostle who wasnt martyred, namely John. He was the only one and that was so he would write the Book of Revelation. It was so that we would know what was to come upon us in the Last Days. There are no smooth things to hear. We have to understand what is happening in this sequence. Israel will go through the time of Jacobs Trouble. We will flee, city to city, and our people will not have completed running through the cities of Israel till the son of man comes (Mat. 10:23). Thats a key text. The idea of running through the cities of Israel tells us there is a nation on the move. There are refugees, etc. Discouragement is Satans weapon. He uses it against us, especially when we are given a smooth scenario like a place of safety. When we finally endure persecution, and endure these things written for us, we become discouraged. There is no soft solution. We have a job to do under these systems. From this follows tribulation, when we finally get to the point. The real aim of Satan is to do away with the elect. The reason the Church is fragmented is because God has put people in different places, to stop the work being inhibited in the Last Days. Satan wants to stop the elect, because the elect are the nucleus, the backbone, in the Millennium. The only thing that we really know is that Christ will protect us; for the righteous, their bread and water will be sure. The elect are the only reason for Christs intervention on the planet. The elect go beyond the 144,000; beyond the Great Multitude to the nation and the concepts of Israel, the physical groups that are destined by God to form part of His system. Note the Olivet prophecies. Except for the elect’s sake, this whole world would be allowed to perish. Christ intervenes in order that none of those people in the Plan of God, even down the road to the end of the Millennium, are prejudiced. God has already determined who is going to be called and at what stage. It is not God’s will that any flesh should perish and that tells us that no flesh will perish. Christ will intervene because of the elect. He wont let one of the elect suffer any harm unless it serves God’s purpose. If we suffer any harm at all, we know it is because Christ can use us and our strengths to be witnesses to Gods system. Everyone is strong. All do something as a witness in some way and work through the system. The whole world is deceived. There are a multitude of churches at the moment, most of which have rapture doctrines, where one gets raptured up to Heaven when Christ comes, and everyone else is going to be destroyed except the believer, because they are part of the great elect system. We are all God’s people. The elect are a small nucleus within God’s people, who are a further elect. Everything that happens to our people is part of this ongoing sequence through to the end of the seventh seal. The seventh seal ends at the end of the seventh trumpet, which is the end of the seven vials of the wrath of God. It is a complete sequence. The elect do not stand apart from the nation. The elect without the nation is an elitist concept. The example of Moses at Sinai is relevant. He put himself in front of the Angel of the Lord, to offer himself to be killed in order that his people might be saved. That is our example. We have to pray, fast and work together on a continual basis to save these people. God calls us out in order that we prepare ourselves. We have to clean our minds of the worldly systems. Literally tear out of our minds the things that pollute it. We are holy to the Lord and must not be entertained by the worlds systems of entertainment. It alters our minds, rendering us ineffective to sacrifice to the Lord. We cannot indiscriminately expose ourselves to concepts, videos, etc. which attack the very spiritual structure we are trying to build up. View TV carefully, if that is even now possible. If we dont, we will render ourselves unfit to sacrifice to the Lord. *This message is one of a series taken from this Christian Churches of God study paper. ccg.org/weblibs/study-papers/p140.html
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 12:40:00 +0000
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